Classical CD

Lohengrin, Salvatore Sciarrino's "azione invisibile", is both a gloss on Wagner's opera and a sly debunking of it. In Sciarrino's monodrama, based on one of Jules Laforgue's Moralités Légendaires, episodes from the story are viewed through the distinctly jaundiced eyes and ears of Elsa, the woman Lohengrin marries and then deserts. A single voice narrates and takes the roles of both the protagonists, while Sciarrino's fabulously refined orchestral imagination conjures up an evocative and constantly shifting soundscape behind it. It's a compelling little tour de force, with its moments of comedy - like Elsa's efforts to get her husband to do his marital duty on their wedding night - mixed in with freewheeling fantasy, that is all explained at the very end when Elsa is revealed as a patient in a mental hospital. On disc it sounds more contrived than it seems in a live performance, but Sciarrino's music, full of wisps and threads of sound, are constantly bewitching.